How Deep Is Your Commitment? Crossing Borders via Cultural Immersion

Cultural immersion experiences have been used in multicultural counselor training courses to address racism. Cultural immersion experiences include activities designed to provide concentrated, direct, substantial, and meaningful interactions with multiple elements of a target culture for the purpose of promoting crosscultural competency. In this article, the author shares how she immersed herself in another culture by crossing a border outside her comfort zone in order to assess her degree of competency. In using cultural immersion to examine attitudes and beliefs that could detrimentally influence her work with culturally diverse clients, the author had an experience that simultaneously surprised and humbled her. She discovered a set of lessons as she journeyed into recognizing, owning, and working through her conscious and unconscious biases.